“Organic” is something of a buzz word. In the food sector, it carries connotations of healthy living, natural growth and honest, responsibly sourced products. Those connotations are just as relevant when the term relates to marketing campaigns. Companies encourage and maintain healthy growth through the use of carefully targeted organic content marketing. Doing so builds trust in the customer base while extending the brand’s reach. You may already be using organic marketing as part of your business strategy (perhaps without even realizing it). But, if you aren’t, it’s time to consider how to plant the seeds of a new campaign that helps your business to grow and flourish.
An organic content marketing system is customer-centric, focusing on giving your customers an improved online experience. You aren’t paying for your place. So, you need valuable content that provides answers to questions, and highlights why you have the best solution. If you establish yourself as a good source of essential content, you build an engagement with customers. And, in turn, you build your brand. But this type of marketing requires time and effort, and a good system is essential to reap rewards.
Conversely, if your business is in a tight spot, you can decrease your budget or stop spending altogether. You can also specify when you advertise, so if you are having a sale this month and want to reach a larger audience, you can run a campaign focused on the sale just during this month. Or, if you offer special deals on Tuesdays, you can schedule your ads to run only on Tuesdays.
I'm thinking about "less to do" (linking-social media) sites with physical products … Amazon and other merchants. And adding a PPC campaign instead of using social media and constantly toiling away building links and writing articles. Is there an easy way to get sites like this to rank while profiting with some paid traffic? Your opinion on this dilemma .. SEO vs PAID traffic or both would be much appreciated.
The ideal behind this is not only to achieve more traffic, but obtain more qualifed traffic to your website, traffic that arrives at your website with the purpose of purchasing a product or service. There are many agencies and budgets available, yet at the time when Choosing SEO Services make sure they cater for your needs and strike the right balance between budget and objectives.
Optimization techniques are highly tuned to the dominant search engines in the target market. The search engines' market shares vary from market to market, as does competition. In 2003, Danny Sullivan stated that Google represented about 75% of all searches.[63] In markets outside the United States, Google's share is often larger, and Google remains the dominant search engine worldwide as of 2007.[64] As of 2006, Google had an 85–90% market share in Germany.[65] While there were hundreds of SEO firms in the US at that time, there were only about five in Germany.[65] As of June 2008, the marketshare of Google in the UK was close to 90% according to Hitwise.[66] That market share is achieved in a number of countries.
While organic search may drive many times more traffic to your site than paid search, you can use this report to see the quality of traffic driven by each method. For example, if you look atSite Usage statistics, you may see that organic search delivers 20 to 30 times the number of visitors, but those visitors view only half as many pages and have twice the bounce rate. And when you look at Ecommerce statistics, you may see that visitors from paid search have a much higher rate of transactions, along with a higher average value per transaction, and a higher dollar value per visit. If you find that your visitors who arrive via paid search represent a significantly higher value customer, that may be an argument to invest more in paid search.
But if someone performs a search for Moz, well, guess what? I mean we can nail that sucker. We can definitely rank for that. Google is not going to take away our ability to rank for our own brand name. In fact, Google knows that, in the navigational search sense, they need to provide the website that the person is looking for front and center. So if we can create more demand for Moz than there is for SEO tools, which I think there's something like 5 or 10 times more demand already for Moz than there is tools, according to Google Trends, that's a great way to go. You can do the same thing through your content, through your social media, and through your email marketing. Even through search you can search and create demand for your brand rather than unbranded terms.
If you check out some of the suggestions below this though, you're likely to find some opportunities. You can also plug in a few variations of the question to find some search volume; for example, I could search for "cup of java" instead of "what is the meaning of a cup of java" and I'll get a number of keyword opportunities that I can align to the question.
Traffic data is a great way to take the temperature of your website and marketing initiatives. When you are writing and promoting blog content on a regular basis, you can use traffic data to track results and correlate these efforts to actual ROI. Be sure to look at traffic numbers over long-term intervals to see trends and report on improvement over time.
That's why it's necessary to always stay abreast of developments in the SEO world, so that you can see these algorithm updates coming or you can determine what to do once they’ve been released. The WordStream blog is a great resource for SEO updates, but we also recommend Search Engine Land and Search Engine Roundtable for news on updates. Glenn Gabe of G-Squared Interactive is also a great resource for analyzing the causes and impact of algorithm updates.
Content is one of the 3 main Google ranking factors. As a matter of fact, having a blog can help you get your content indexed faster. An active blog – relying on qualitative and insightful content, and backed by authoritative links – will help you improve your rankings and thus your organic traffic. Also, long-form copies (above 1200 words) tend to rank higher and be crawled more often.

When the topic of SEO vs SEM arises, some experts may argue that SEO is the best way to go as it offers higher quality leads at a cheaper cost when compared to SEM. However, it isn’t so simple. Every business is different and has unique needs. For example, your small business may not have a big ad budget and it may also lack the resources needed for doing effective SEO.

Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether. Such penalties can be applied either automatically by the search engines' algorithms, or by a manual site review. One example was the February 2006 Google removal of both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany for use of deceptive practices.[53] Both companies, however, quickly apologized, fixed the offending pages, and were restored to Google's list.[54]
One of the reasons for a traffic drop can also be due to your site losing links. You may be seeing a direct loss of that referral traffic, but there could also be indirect effects. When your site loses inbound links, it tells Google that your site isn't as authoritative anymore, which leads to lower search rankings that in turn lead to traffic drops (because fewer people are finding your site if it's not ranked as highly and more).
The first is that you look at who are your current customers, who are your prospects, what groups are they in, and join those same groups if they’re relevant and not too title specific to a marketer or a different field that you’re not in. But really starting with the folks that you already are working with and using them to figure out which groups are most relevant. This is also especially important because I think it was about a year ago, LinkedIn now made all the groups private. So you can’t go in and look at what’s going on in the group. And it’s really hard to know which ones are the best ones to join just by doing simple searches on say the title of the group. So, start with the folks that you know.
Website saturation and popularity, or how much presence a website has on search engines, can be analyzed through the number of pages of the site that are indexed by search engines (saturation) and how many backlinks the site has (popularity). It requires pages to contain keywords people are looking for and ensure that they rank high enough in search engine rankings. Most search engines include some form of link popularity in their ranking algorithms. The following are major tools measuring various aspects of saturation and link popularity: Link Popularity, Top 10 Google Analysis, and Marketleap's Link Popularity and Search Engine Saturation.
The position of a link on a search results page is important. Depending on the search term, organic search results often make up only a small portion of the page. Since ads are at the top of the results page, on a device with a relatively small display -- such as a notebook, tablet or smartphone -- the visible organic search results may consist of only one or two items.

In the end of the day it depends on the size of the website you are working with and how well known the brand is in the market. You can adapt some of the strategies listed above in the post on scale and it can have a highly positive impact on a web property, the property in question is a real content house so any thing is possible. What else do you suggest we should do I will advise you if it has been done already?

Understanding the working mechanism of social algorithms is not a piece of cake. The algorithm for each social platform works differently. For instance, on Facebook, a core factor that affects the rankings of a post is its relevancy score, whereas on YouTube the total watch time of the video per session decides whether a video enters a ‘Recommended Video’ section or not.

The second is to really avoid promoting yourself, or your services, or your business, in these groups when you first join them. Like with any social network, you really need to build trust. And the best way to do that is to simply engage with the content that’s already there. Start replying and making genuine comments about the content being posted by people that could be prospects for you.
First, I will show you a quick snapshot of the traffic uplift, which yielded an additional 400,000 unique visitors from organic search traffic on a monthly basis. Then I will explain to you the steps in which we took to get the client to this level. I have also tried to keep this quite general so everyone can adapt their own situation to this case study.
Well as noted in the post it is not just above the links that was only one key part of a wider strategy. This website in question has deep levels of content. So it is not just about a blog section, they have numerous high quality content sections we have developed over time. It would not be advisable ever to attack competitors sites with low quality links.
SEO techniques can be classified into two broad categories: techniques that search engine companies recommend as part of good design ("white hat"), and those techniques of which search engines do not approve ("black hat"). The search engines attempt to minimize the effect of the latter, among them spamdexing. Industry commentators have classified these methods, and the practitioners who employ them, as either white hat SEO, or black hat SEO.[49] White hats tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hats anticipate that their sites may eventually be banned either temporarily or permanently once the search engines discover what they are doing.[50]
James, you give a great template for how a business needs to move forward in their chosen niche online. Quite informative and the meeting of minds has been something a number of us have done online and in person to gain better insight into our small similar businesses. Thank you for sharing your detailed approach to increasing organic traffic...content still is king.
Nathan Gotch is the founder of Gotch SEO, a white label SEO services provider and SEO training company based in St. Louis. Gotch SEO is now one of the top SEO blogs in the world and over 300 entrepreneurs have joined his SEO training platform, Gotch SEO Academy. Nathan’s SEO strategies and advice have also been featured on Forbes, Entrepreneur, Business.com, and Search Engine Journal.
In order to optimize your SEO results, it’s important to measure the impact of your efforts on web site traffic and lead/sales generation. Google Webmaster Tools can give you important insight into how your site is functioning and identify potential errors you should correct. An analytics tool such as Google’s Universal Analytics is helpful for measuring changes in search traffic as well as tracking visitors interactions with your web site that are a direct result of SEO. Marketing automation tools and call tracking tools can help you tie leads and sales back to SEO.
But search ranking is competitive, so naturally, it’s not easy to claim that top spot in organic search. That’s why many marketers and website owners pay to play, and why so many people choose the Pay Per Click (PPC) route. It’s fast. It’s effective. It’s high-visibility for your business. The caveat? You stop paying, and your visibility goes **POOF**.
Use long tail keywords. Don’t just go with the most popular keywords in your market. Use keywords that are more specific to your product or service. In time, Google and other search engines will identify your website or blog as a destination for that particular subject, which will boost your content in search rankings and help your ideal customers find you. These tools will help.
You can also use organic to increase audience engagement with your content. For example, let’s say you’re a ticketing website for sporting events and you know that some of your followers are rugby fanatics. If you have a new blog interviewing Dylan Hartley (current England captain), then it makes sense to personally contact them (or at least key influencers) via their preferred social network and tell them about the blog, and ask them to comment/share. It’s personal and increases the chance they’ll see/read your content.
Fix the meta description. Phil Tadros, leader of coworking space Space Doejo, emphasized the importance of the meta description. “I went out of my way to spend time tweaking and fine-tuning the meta description of my site," Tadros said, "because this is one of the first things people see. It’s vital that you make a promise you can keep.” Your meta description is your first chance to encourage people to click on to your website. There are plenty of plugins allowing you to edit the meta description if you don’t have a custom-made platform. A meta description may not impact SEO directly the way it used to, but it enhances the user experience.
I’ve always been a believer that hard work gets the best results, and in practice it always ends up being true. On the web it’s no different. If you want more organic traffic, you have to work for it. That means giving your best effort every time, going after opportunities your competitors have missed, being consistent, guest blogging strategically, and staying on Google’s good side.
Why? It allows you track visits on a specific web page. Whatever page that newly acquired customers land on after the sale, this will be your “Destination.” You can add the URL of that page in the “Goal details” section. There are other optional details that you could include. For example, you can assign a monetary value to a newly acquired customer. You can also map the journey that customers take up until they convert. At the very least, configure the first option. You need that hard dollar value to calculate ROI.
In my opinion, for many business owners new to the world of digital marketing, there is often a common misconception that SEO and social media are separate entities, each operating in their own world with distinct goals. SEO and organic social media marketing work together to create value and provide relevance for your audience. Any good digital marketing strategy should do its best to have both SEO and social media working together, in tandem.
Retargeting: Each platform offers retargeting to help you reach people who’ve already visited your website. The benefit of retargeting is that a conversion is more likely when you know the prospect is interested. You might also upload an email list and use Facebook Custom Audiences to serve ads directly to subscribers. In the following example, we see two ads that show in the Facebook sidebar to reach former web visitors.
Unless you’re eBay or Amazon, PPC can prove to be an expensive affair. You may initially not feel the pinch of it, but overtime, the costs keep growing. If you’re not doing enough testing with your ads, you may end up losing a chunk of your ad budget without any great returns. Simply focusing on the wrong keywords or markets can make a huge dent in your wallet if you are lenient with your ad budget.
With organic search, you don’t have to outspend your competitors to outrank them. Your competitors can’t recreate the content experience that you use to drive organic traffic. This one is major. PPC is easy to replicate and reverse engineer. Many spy tools allow you to dissect paid campaigns to see what’s working and what’s not. You can get insight into what ad creatives generate the most clicks.
But search ranking is competitive, so naturally, it’s not easy to claim that top spot in organic search. That’s why many marketers and website owners pay to play, and why so many people choose the Pay Per Click (PPC) route. It’s fast. It’s effective. It’s high-visibility for your business. The caveat? You stop paying, and your visibility goes **POOF**.
Hi Lynn, WOW another well written and informative post. I only use PPC to make sure my copy converts, otherwise I use organic traffic only. I have printed off this post and will have by my computer, as another tool to read everyday to make sure I am keeping on track. You are 1 of 3 people I keep subscribed to, because you help, you keep me motivated, you tell it like it is. You give great content, which is a lesson for us all to remember, it is OK to drive traffic to your site, but if you do not have what the seeker wants, then they leave, giving you a horrendous bounce rate and no conversions.
Look at the different search engines (sources) that drive traffic to your site to determine where you want to invest your resources. For example, if you're getting an overwhelming amount of visitors and revenue from a particular search engine, that's an obvious source of profitable traffic and an area in which you might want to make further investment; but you might also find another search engine that delivers only a few visitors, but ones who represent a very high Per Visit Value. In this latter case, you might want to increase your spend in that area to drive more of those high-value visitors to your site.
This means that each organic search visit is worth $7.35. Chances are, you’ll spend WAY less than that to generate that one visit. How’s that for some rock-solid ROI? You can get even more specific with this by looking at the organic search traffic for a particular keyword. By extension, you can calculate the ROI of that keyword. You can begin to see how this can ramp up your SEO game.
Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns generate paid traffic. The goal of running a PPC ad campaign is to increase visibility of and traffic to your website by showing up in the paid search results – you can identify ‘paid’ results easily as they are brief advertisements separate from the organic results. These ads are prompted when a user types in a relevant keyword into the search engine.
When used correctly, PPC can be highly efficient. Since you only pay when people click and you can target people looking for specific terms, it can be an excellent means of bringing people to your site. Even more importantly, PPC ads have been shown in some studies to even boost visibility and clicks, particularly if your organic result starts to slip further down the page. This can help improve brand reach and maintain a strong reputation.